Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Jason Kenney and the NGO Monitor on a Rampage to Destroy Humanitarian Organizations

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The American Enterprise Institute, home of Dick Cheney, Lynn Cheney, Richard Perle and William Kristol, and former home of David Frum, has launched a new campaign to rid the world of any notion of human compassion, in exchange for bombs, bullets and bibles. They call it NGO monitor and if you get caught in their cross hairs ' Boom! - You're gone.

KAIROS can attest to just how ruthless they are, and Jason Kenney has now become a soldier for their tyrannical forces.

When he spoke in Jerusalem recently, he announced that he had indeed cut the funding to KAIROS because they did not support Israeli aggression. Ironically, the broad statement upset many Israelis, who also want an end to the conflict; and seek a two-state solution. Surely Jason Kenny doesn't believe that Jewish people living in Israel are antisemitic, simply because they value all human life.

However, Kenney is under contract to the Christian extremist group 'Christians United for Israel', so must do as they tell him. The Canadian head of this group is Charles McVety (1), who sees Stephen Harper more than Laureen, and is so close to Stockwell Day, Jim Flaherty and Jason Kenney, that people are starting to talk.

CUFI, whose founder is the American multi-millionaire and doomsdayer John Hagee, believe in a biblical prophesy that demands the annihilation of the Muslims in the Middle East, at which time all the Jews are put in boats and lovingly transported to Israel.

One of the teachers at McVety's Christian College, Reverend Dean Bye, states: "It is estimated that upwards of six million Jewish people are still dwelling in North America ... North American Jews must recognize they must all "return" to Israel..." and he warns: "the time of the U.S.A. being a safe haven for the Jews has ended!" . He adds that "we don’t throw them overboard [like Jonah] but lovingly assist them home to Israel. " (2)

But as Dr. Stephen Scheinberg, a man who has written extensively on the subject points out "... most of the Jewish community has not responded to his generous proposal that they leave their homes for aliyah to Israel," even if they are being 'lovingly assisted'. (3)

Canadians shouldn't be surprised to learn of other NGOs who are on Kenney's hit list. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for starters. If AEI's NGO Monitor, headed up by Gerald Steinberg, has it's way, they will definitely be next.

NGOM started as a joint project of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) and B'nai Brith International, with funds from the Wechsler Family Foundation (U.S.). It operates out of the JCPA whose president is U.S.-born Dore Gold, former Foreign Policy Adviser to both Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, and former ambassador to the United Nations for Israel. NGOM's editor is Gerald M. Steinberg, a professor at right-wing Bar-Ilan University and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post*. (4)

Rob Lipton and Cecilie Surasky wrote about the NGO Monitor in 2007:

Although using language that would appear to give the impression of a neutral watch dog of non-governmental human rights organizations (NGOs), NGO Monitor (NGOM) is a partisan organization that weakens universal human rights infrastructure by charging many of the world’s best known human rights organizations with bias against Israel.

Their mission statement says they were founded to: promote accountability, and advance a vigorous discussion on the reports and activities of humanitarian NGOs in the framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, a more straightforward description of their ideological bias comes from liberal Jewish thinker Leonard Fein who says: "NGO Monitor, is an organization that believes that the best way to defend Israel is to condemn anyone who criticizes it."

NGO Monitor operates out of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Institute for contemporary Affairs. Its editor is Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who wrote not just about NGOs, but also journalists and academics in 2003: "Israel-bashing is promoted by that other axis of evil, journalists, diplomats (including the United Nations), academics and self-proclaimed universal human rights groups. These non-governmental organizations (NGOs) enjoy a halo effect, and an image of promoting noble causes without political bias exempts them from scrutiny. They are also extremely influential, and their reports are quoted extensively. In reality, however, these NGOs are at the very core of the anti-Israel axis of evil. By promoting the campaign of hatred and delegitimization, such groups are morally guilty of justifying terrorism.

This world-view is behind the single-minded commitment to weakening some of the world's most respected human rights and civil society groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem and the New Israel Fund.

As any superficial or substantive look at AI and HRW shows, they offer equal opportunity criticisms of human rights violations across the world, yet NGO Monitor views them as players in a nefarious plot to delegitimize Israel. Israeli human rights groups, instead of central players in the fight for a just country for all of its citizens, are seen as a kind of fifth column.

In Monitoring the Monitor, in 2005, Leonard Fein decided to monitor just one NGOM report on Human Rights Watch, one of NGOM's favorite targets. The results of his efforts are telling: On April 18, NGO Monitor issued a draft report on Human Rights Watch, which claims that an objective quantitative analysis shows that Human Rights Watch places an extreme emphasis on critical assessments of Israel. "I have reviewed the draft document and checked its central claim against the actual documents Human Rights Watch has produced regarding Israel since the year 2000.

"The discrepancy between NGO Monitor's claims and Human Rights Watch's record is massive. Human Rights Watch has in fact devoted more attention to each of five other nations in the region. Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran ; than to Israel. I called this to Steinberg' s attention on May 3, and he responded that NGO Monitor would examine and respond to the discrepancies. Since then, I have received 27 emails from Steinberg; not one has in any way responded to this matter. Yet the draft report remains online, unamended." (5)